What am I up to this week? Mostly editing, producing new content for Skybok…. check out its YouTube channel. I am using a Canon Xa10, Canon 5D MK2, Canon Rebel T5….. Editing in Adobe Premier CC. If you like travel, tourism, history – you might like it!

East London

Grahamstown

Port Elizabeth

Cape Town

This year for Madiba Day the Rotary Club of Algoa Bay gave back for 67 minutes – 1 minute for every year Nelson Mandela worked to make the world a better place – at The Provincial Hospital. The hospital is in Port Elizabeth, Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa. In honour of his birthday, the call is out for people everywhere to give 67 minutes of their time to help their community in some way. Everyone has the power to change the world. The United Nations declared 18 July as “Nelson Mandela International Day” in 2009.

I was honoured to receive an award as a finalist at this year’s Business Women’s Association of South Africa’s Regional Business Achiever Awards. Held at The Crystal Towers in Cape Town, I was thrilled to receive this recognition of distinction in business as an entrepreneur in the film industry! Skybok is all about connecting South Africa. I look forward to our exciting future doing so. I am very blessed that I was able to turn something I am passionate about into a profitable venture. It’s exciting to have been named in amidst such successful women across the region in all industries. I am proudly South African and marvel each day at our beautiful country and our people. Thank you, BWA! See more of my pics from the event here.

Skybokis handling Gravel Road Entertainment’s “Retro Afrika Bioscope” Social Media Marketing at the Waterfront Film Studios in Cape Town. Retro Afrika Bioscope is Gravel Road’s specialty release label for classic retro African content. The exciting challenge is to digitally restore 160 films that were made during the 70’s & 80’s in South Africa! We launched the Mayibuye Film Festivalwhich ran on SABC 1 from April 13-27 to showcase 6 films that have been restored so far. We’ve been to film festivals all over the world, including the Berlin Film Festival in Germany, The Carthage Film Festivalin Tunisia, The Lumiere Film Festivalin France + we also had our North American debutat MoMa in New York! The community is now around 30,000 members online!

Some of the films:

See the crew working hard on digitally remastering the films – read more about them here. See the gallery of behind-the-scenes here (Photos by Patrick Ryan, shot on location at the Waterfront Film Studios).

It was the first time these films were seen by audiences in over 40 years, as well as being their first ever TV debut. I think these stories are so important because they are our heritage. It’s exciting to me that we can restore them to perfect condition and show them to modern South Africa. One of our films is Joe Bullet, originally banned in 1973 by the Apartheid government. It has now been recovered, fully restored & premiered at the Durban International Film Festival in July 2014. It’s crazy to think that while it was being made Nelson Mandela was in prison and Winnie had just been arrested!

2 films aired back-to-back every Sunday night in April from 20h30 on SABC 1. If you missed them you can catch them via online streaming. We’ve got an awesome partnership with Wabona, one of Africa’s premiere video streaming services, to make the films available to the public for free (http://wabona.com/). If you are a Mxit user, watch them through that platform via Cinemo (Wabona’s mobile service). A new deal that’s been struck with Commuter TV will see the films running on TV screens in mini bus taxis throughout the country. There’s no excuse not to see these vintage African films!

This past week I received a nomination for the BWA Regional Business Achiever Awards in the category of “Emerging Entrepreneur”. I am absolutely honoured by this and look forward to the judging interview process and gala event in May. Thank you, BWA! I thoroughly enjoyed the business breakfast held at the V&A Waterfront Clocktower in the Atlantic Imbizo Conference Room. I took some lovely photos of the view from the conference room over the harbour in the early morning.

Skybok recently covered events for Rotary PE West as part of their “Medieval Festival”. It’s a whole weekend of festivities themed around the Middle Ages and it’s hosted at Victoria Park in Port Elizabeth. Their “Royal Banquet” is on a Friday night where everyone arrives dressed up in costumes from the Middle Ages. There’s a dinner and lots of entertainment. During the Saturday, they host an entire day filled with arts, crafts and activities that people during those times used to play! Together with my brother, I filmed and photographed these events for them. I spent about two days editing and adding music and I am so excited about the final result! It was such a festive evening and day and we managed to capture the spirit and ambiance into two easy 2 minute video profiles. See both videos below. To watch in the best quality be sure to change the viewing settings to 1080 p HD (click on the cog in the toolbar at the bottom of the video as it plays). If you are in South Africa and would like to get in touch with us to film your business or event, see our facebook page here. We also have our twitter here, our YouTube Channel here and our website here.